Review of The Water Diviner (2014) by Kevin A — 13 May 2015

This is a good film. WW1 doesn't receive much attention outside of Australia, where it's part of their national identity. Which is a real shame given that this is the hundredth anniversary. Kind of like A Very Long Engagement this film is the war told through the aftermath rather than the event. Russell Crowe (in his directorial debut) stars as the father of three sons killed in battle who has come to Turkey to find and bury them. It's a sad setting, but only overwhelmingly so when it needs to be. The flashback scenes as they relive the final moments of the sons' lives is truly heartbreaking, but scenes like this are interspersed with Crowe's budding relationship with a young Turkish widow and her son which seem to show life continuing on after the loss.

Whatever else he did Crowe's greatest achievement was in choosing a superb cinematographer. There is a certain stark beauty throughout the film, even in its bleakest moments, and the wonderful and rarely filmed vistas of Turkey offer an appropriate background for these events. The story isn't particularly deep at any point, and maybe it could have wrung out a little more emotion if it had played up the hopelessness more, but overall it was satisfying tale. If it occasionally drifted into a straight adventure film towards the end, at least it was a good adventure yarn and took us someplace we've rarely seen.

As with all Aussie war films there is an irritating prerequisite character: the out of touch English tofficer. He will show up in all WW1 films regardless of whether he serves any purpose or not. And here he is in all his glory, showing up at the Gallipoli battlefield and commenting on how nice it was and that he can't see what the Aussies were complaining about. Just once I'd like to see an Aussie officer as the needless villain, or perhaps some British fellow who'd been through the trenches (as this guy logically should have been) and could be at least mildly sympathetic towards fellow soldiers.

The film's depiction of the Greeks is likewise entirely negative. On one level this is unsurprising since the Greeks were real bastards in trying to take advantage of the perceived weakness to take back their Roman Empire and ethnically cleanse the non-Greek residents of Asia Minor (shortly before the Turks turned the tables and committed exactly the same atrocities to them), but on the other hand they don't look like a professional army at all so much as a group of disorganised pirates with surprisingly heavy firepower. It's a little odd to see the Greeks so demonized in what is largely a film arguing for common feeling among all men.